Wednesday, September 27, 2006



Energy Highway
Millions of cars travel 24X7 over the highways network around the world. How is about reclaiming the lost frictional energy?
Imagine clusters of frictionless, freely rotating wheels placed alond the high ways at predesigned areas. The upper surface of the wheels are flushed with the road surface. The energy produced are picked up, processed, transmitted and distributed. Definitely a conceptual design is needed.
The picture on the left shows the freely rotating wheels. A current collector strip runs parallel to the highway. The energies are pickedup and processed for routing to the T&D facilities.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Offshore outsourcing: Important driver
Engineering OutsourcingGenerally, outsourcing most of the times tends to be related to cost saving. Well, this may be one part of the story but not the single driver. Basically, one goes to outsource when it is not possible to accomplish the same way in-house. So this may be cost, technology, time lines or whatever.With our experience of handling various projects from offshore, we have seen engineering outsourcing is also interpreted most of the times as drafting assignments. Equally untrue is this interpretation!There are many areas like design, analysis, project management where the customer simply may not have the expertise. Recently, we did a finite element analysis of a complicated configuration for a large manufacturing US organization. It is interesting to note that the organization had been manufacturing the same product for 20 years but when it came to performing a finite element analysis, they had to outsource offshore.In this case demand for technology prevailed over everything else. So offshore companies are not solely meant for labor intensive functions - many of them have highly specialized technology skill to offer.